Sunday, 8 May 2016

Light Painting with PreK

We have been having fun with light painting for a unit our PreK students (3 years old) have been doing about light and shadow. First, we took some corrugated cardboard and covered the windows of the multi-purpose room to black it out. (White velcro tabs in the corners worked fine and you can barely see them when you take the cardboard down.)

I had some kids from our Makers Club help me set up a DSLR (Nikon D3200) on a tripod and do some experimenting with the settings. We settled on 3-second exposures with the aperture set to F8.

I found these great little LED lights that fit on the ends of your fingers and for the first session with the little ones, we just messed around to see how it worked.

I was actually planning to move on to some new learning engagements with this class but this went so well that we decided to keep going and dig a little deeper. In class, the teachers had the students practice drawing shapes and numbers in the air with their fingers so that when they came back to me they were pretty good at it. Here's how some of the better ones came out (I flipped the pictures on the computer--much easier than getting the children to write backwards...) :

Having a remote control for the camera made this a lot easier. I was able to assign someone to turn the lights on and off and someone else to take the photos.

The next step is to try to calibrate my printer so I can print a few of these out really nicely...